During the hiatus between the Laboratory of Dark Matters Guest Projects residency and installing at Cleveland Ironstone Mining Museum was a chance to test out installation options and visit a few events.

There are a few alternative options for a dodecahedron net – this was my favourite.

Connecting dark matter

Testing in my studio which had turned into an unventilated sauna that day

Heat is what makes it impossible to time travel backwards. I think. Though applying heat (200°C) to the plates again made the disperse colours that had vanished reappear………………temporarily

Always the unexpected outcome.

A real treat at the Barbican was a live accompaniment by Tindersticks to the exploratory science films made in the early 1900’s by F. Percy Smith, naturalist, inventor and documentarist. Link here- Soundtrack from documentary “Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith” (2016) by Stuart A. Staples.

As soon as I saw this documentation I knew I would like Oliver Beer.

Is it bad to always think – oh this reminds me of… well this reminded me of Mark Leckey – The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things

except these artefacts sang out, resonating with the air vibrating through their hollow forms

Mark Leckey The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things

Mark Leckey The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things

but it was still an interrogation of a collection of objects, squeezing out an essence/aura.

Then there was the building itself – Galerie Thaddeus Ropac – it’s space mapped through sound – the singers slamming their voices into the corners which threw them back, rising and echoing off the walls, harmonising to a crescendo until every inch of space vibrated

and there was no air left to breathe that wasn’t full of sound, it was incredibly beautiful and absorbing. Also from the inside out – an ear trumpet to the world beyond

street noises magnified

Another sound experience was KlangHaus 800 Breaths at the South Bank Centre. More in earnest. More theatre.

Great to be escorted through the otherwise out of bounds roof spaces and enjoy the mash up of film projections and live music played LOUD amid the galvanised steel ducting and ventilation systems.

Time for the Royal Society Summer Exhibition late night adults only serving poison cocktails.

Dr Kathryn Harkup gave us the low down on the most efficient murder tools. Learnt that hemlock looks very like parsley; just 1 gram of nicotine (eaten) would kill you in 4 minutes – very quick for a poisoning; 100 cups of coffee in one day would kill you with caffeine – but the water would get you first.

First stop – Modelling the Invisible – Durham University – where I met David Cerdeno, a colleague of Cham Ghag who I had only emailed the week before about the LODM project- they had a device where you could set your dark matter detection experiment parameters, run the experiment and warp forward in time to get your results – lots of lucky people were finding dark matter – shows optimism for their project which is going to be installed at Snowlab in Canada.

I was encouraged to track down and read a series of books by the physicist George Gamow explaining scientific theories through the character of Mr Tompkins who experiences dreams in which he enters alternative worlds where the physical constants have radically different values from those they have in the real world.

Had a chat about Large Hadron Collider computations that come from smashing particles together – 600 million collisions every second and the incredible number of particles that get produced and just how many types of particle there are – I was pointed in the direction of the particle physics bible.

Tried to ascertain what Gravitational Waves are made of but ended up no clearer, they are bound up in spacetime and measuring them involves incredible accuracy but I couldn’t get to grips with what medium they use to travel across space – is it the as yet unobserved gravitons? Was informed that if I had a metre ruler and took it to Mars it would be shorter but so would I be, therefore I wouldn’t notice.

Quantum gravity is the sought after theory. It may turn out that the distinction between spacetime and matter is invalid at the Planck scale.
Every body gravitates because it bends the space surrounding it, changing the flow of time in the process – at the same time how a body moves in a gravitational field is determined by how it fits into warped spacetime.

I think these are phenomena I am too big or too small to notice.

Bit of a public engagement thing and free apps going on at www.laserlabs.org

Should I want to make a mini supernova I need a hydrogen based product about a mm across – hit it with a very powerful laser (the Orion Laser would do) until it reaches impossible temperatures – it will explode into a supernova that would fit in the palm of my hand. Ouch.

Susan Eyre Sun Factor

Apparently around 10 supernovas happen every second, bringing home the vastness of the universe. Some comfort is that our sun is too small to explode in this way. Plasma makes up a lot of the universe but on earth the temperature is too cool – plasma occurs when something gets so hot the constituent parts of the atom separate. Plasma is considered the fourth state of matter. The three other states are solid, liquid, and gas.

There is a new type of laser called maser – masers amplify microwave signals from space, it doesn’t add any noise as the photons are fired into a crystal which absorbs them, then releases them all at the same time in coherence so they have less interference – all nicely lined up and much more intense – they used to need to be cryogenically cooled to work but now they have made it possible using a crystal to make all electrons move in the same way. This is good for receiving weak signals from space like communications from the Mars Rover.

Luci Eldridge Mars reconstructed

Having been on the peripheries of Melanie King’s Phosphorescence workshops as part of Dark Matters Lab. it was interesting to try to understand how fluorescence works.

Southampton University were on hand explaining how fluorescence works in coral but I think the principle is always the same – the fluorescent substance takes in blue light and emits light in a different colour at a lower energy, the electrons drop down in their orbits of the nucleus to base level and then move back up. The substance atom would usually have a coiled shape and the electrons get lost in the coils. Coral is a shell structure containing symbiotic algae and the fluorescence helps protect the algae from too much sunlight in shallow waters.

I enjoyed the ritual based symmetry of Benedict Drew’s The Trickle Down Syndrome installation at Whitechapel gallery. Ready to worship. Fearful of outcomes.

A full day at the Science Museum assessing Robot Futures: Vision and Touch in Roboticsa symposium hosted by Luci Eldridge and Nina Trivedi bringing together engineers, scientists, cultural theorists and artists to explore notions of embodiment and telepresence in the field of robotics and in virtual and augmented realities. It began with a tour of the current Robots exhibition followed by a demonstration of ROBOT DE NIRO by Dr Petar Kormushev of Imperial College Robotics Lab.

This is when we learnt that although huge progress has been made robots are still pretty limited in what they can do physically. Great programme of speakers including Gregory Minnissale: Nonlinear Vision and Touch in Art, Science and Technology; Joey Holder: Ophiux; Nea Ehrlich: Envisioning 21st Century Techno-Vision: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Machine Witnessing in Non-Fiction; Bianca Westermann: Robotic Presences: Encounters with the Artificial between Social Companionship and Embodied Representation; Ruairi Glynn: Animacy Aesthetics; Maya Oppenheimer: The Robotics Division of the Dramaco Instrument Company Introduces the Ensocellorator Reliance Pro II; Stephen Ellis (via Skype): On the character, scope, and meaning of the spatial user interface to Virtual Environments: its recent and deep history; Simon Julier; Nicola Plant and Jeremiah Ambrose: Systems of Seeing: Virtual Gaze Interaction.